Call Time Out In Grant Park

December 19, 1998

For whom is the city's Lakefront Millennium Project being designed? One might have hoped it would be the people of Chicago. One might have hoped planners would determine what Chicagoans need in a Grant Park gathering place and laid plans accordingly.

From the beginning, however, Millennium designers have seemed out to please mainly themselves, though now they're about to change plans in mid-project to accommodate, well, their cultural peers.

Perhaps the average Chicagoan will be well-served by the result. If so, it will be a fortuitous accident.

Don't get us wrong. It's a terrific concept, this idea of Mayor Richard Daley to support a festival music garden, both physically and financially, on top of a multitiered parking deck in the northwest corner of Grant Park. The idea of decking over the old Metra siding east of Michigan Avenue from Monroe to Randolph Streets has been around for decades. The original Lakefront Gardens proposal by the Metropolitan Planning Council, however, would have eliminated the need for the Petrillo Music Shell.

But now that plans are becoming reality, the city's architects at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill have embarked on their own trip. As landscape architects are wont to do, they plan to fill most of the 16-acre deck with flower beds, statuary, fountains, gazebos of various sizes and an ice rink. The deck's primary function, as an outdoor amphitheater for musical performances now held at Petrillo, was treated as a bothersome afterthought. There would be only 3,500 "temporary" seats--barely enough to accommodate performances of the Grant Park Symphony. Overflow crowds will be invited to sit on the Great Lawn (i.e., the ground.) The city's immensely popular festivals (Blues, Jazz, Gospel, Fourth of July, Bulls rallies, Taste-of-Chicago) would have to go elsewhere in the park. . .exactly where nobody seems to know.

Changes are being made, however, even as the caissons are being sunk for the supporting parking structure. A consortium of dance, music and theatrical groups is looking for a prestige site for their 1,500-seat performing arts center. They've saved $20 million for the purpose and want to dovetail their project with Millennium. turning it into an indoor/outdoor venue.

Mayor Daley likes the idea and his City Council already has referred it to the Chicago Plan Commission for approval at its February meeting.

So Chicago is about to get a public music garden that doesn't meet the public's needs attached to a private theater built on public land which, by law and tradition, isn't supposed to have new buildings.

Is it not time to slow down this plan-as-you-go project so as to determine if the needs of the public are being addressed?